Personal identity

personal identity, in metaphysics, the problem of the nature of the identity of persons and their persistence through time.

The notion of personal identity

One makes a judgment of personal identity whenever one says that a person existing at one time is the same as a person existing at another time: e.g., that the president of the United States in 1802—namely, Thomas Jefferson—was the person who in 1776 was the primary author of the Declaration of Independence. Matters of great importance often turn on the truth of such judgments. Whether someone should be punished for a crime, for example, depends on whether he is the person who committed it, and whether someone is the owner of something now may depend on whether he is the person who purchased it at some past time. Whether there is personal immortality, or survival of death, depends on whether a person who dies can be identical with a person existing subsequent to that person’s death.

The topic of personal identity has to do with what the truth of judgments of personal identity consists of and how it can be known. Equivalently, it has to do with the nature of the persistence of persons through time and their awareness of such persistence. Some scholars, such as the 20th-century American philosopher Roderick Chisholm, have denied that there can be an informative answer to such questions; they think that personal identity is “simple and unanalyzable.” But it seems plausible that something can be said about what the sameness through time of automobiles, rivers, and cities consists of, and so it is natural to think that the same should be true of the sameness through time of persons.

Bodily and immaterial-substance theories

What one normally relies on in making judgments of personal identity in everyday life are facts about human bodies—sameness of appearance, sameness of fingerprints, sameness of DNA, and so on. This fact suggests that the sameness of persons consists of the sameness of human bodies. This suggestion of course raises the question of what the sameness of human bodies consists of. It cannot consist simply of similarity of bodily characteristics: different bodies can be alike in appearance and could be alike in fingerprints and DNA. A better answer would be that it consists of spatiotemporal continuity and continuity of bodily characteristics. A single body’s career traces a continuous path through space-time in which bodily properties change only gradually and in certain ways. Such an account would be unacceptable to those, such as the 17th-century French philosopher René Descartes, who take persons to be immaterial substances, or souls, that are only contingently connected with bodies. These philosophers would say that the persistence of a person consists of the persistence of such an immaterial substance. As to what that consists in, the most common answer is that the identity of such substances is simple and unanalyzable.

The psychological view

Both of these accounts of personal identity—the bodily theory and the immaterial-substance theory—were rejected by the 17th-century English philosopher John Locke in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), which contained the first extended treatment of the topic in Western philosophy. Book II, chapter 27, of the Essay, “Of Identity and Diversity,” introduces a famous example in which the soul of a prince, carrying with it consciousness of the prince’s past life, is transferred to the body of a cobbler. Locke argued that the post-transfer cobbler-body person would be the same person as the prince, despite not having the prince’s former body. (Updated versions of this example involve brain transplants rather than soul transfers.) He also held that consciousness can be transferred from one immaterial substance to another, so that the immaterial substance that was initially the mind of one person might become the mind of a different person.

Locke said that the identity of persons consists of sameness of consciousness. This is usually interpreted to mean that identity consists of facts about memory: someone existing now is the same as someone existing yesterday because he remembers the thoughts, experiences, or actions of the earlier person.

Traditional criticisms

Reid, ThomasCourtesy of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, EdinburghThe 18th-century Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid objected to this view with what has come to be known as the “brave officer” example. A small boy is flogged for stealing an apple; later, as a young officer, he remembers the flogging; later still, as an old general, he remembers acting bravely as a young officer but does not remember being flogged as a boy. According to Locke’s theory, Reid thought, the young officer is the same person as the small boy, and the old general is the same person as the young officer, but the old general is not the same person as the small boy—a contradiction, because identity is logically transitive (if A = B and B = C, then A = C). The 18th-century English bishop and philosopher Joseph Butler raised a different objection: Locke’s theory is circular, because the notion of memory it employs presupposes the notion of personal identity.

Despite these objections, views inspired by Locke—called neo-Lockean, or psychological, accounts—have dominated discussions of personal identity since his time, and much of the subsequent history of the topic has centred on debates about whether Reid’s and Butler’s objections can be met. The first response to Reid’s brave officer example, given a prominent statement by the 20th-century British philosopher Paul Grice, was that personal identity consists of continuity of memory. A person’s life can be conceived as consisting of a series of momentary “person stages.” In order for the old general to be identical with the small boy, it is not required that the general remember experiences and actions of the boy but only that the old-general person-stage be linked to the small-boy person-stage by a series of person-stages, each member of which contains memories of something occurring in the immediately preceding stage.

In a subsequent elaboration of this response, memory continuity was replaced by psychological continuity, which includes memory continuity as a special case. Psychological continuity consists of the holding of a number of psychological relations between person-stages—e.g., relations that hold when beliefs and desires produce, through reasoning, new beliefs, desires, intentions, or decisions—as well as the holding of relations that are involved in the retention over time of personality and character traits. The shift from a simple memory theory to a psychological-continuity theory goes some way toward answering Butler’s circularity objection, since it is possible to know whether the relevant psychological relations obtain without already knowing whether the person-stages in question are stages of the same person.

Butler, JosephBBC Hulton Picture LibraryAnother response to Butler’s objection, advanced by the contemporary American philosopher Sydney Shoemaker, is to replace the notion of memory with that of “quasi-memory.” A person quasi-remembers a past experience or action if he has a memory experience that is caused in some appropriate way by that past action or experience. It may be theoretically possible for a person to quasi-remember past experiences or actions—i.e., to have the experience of remembering them as his own—even though they are not in fact his own (see belowFission and special concern). But remembering will be a special case—and perhaps the only actual case—of quasi-remembering. And no circularity will be involved if one uses the notion of quasi-memory in place of the notion of memory in giving one’s account of the psychological continuity that constitutes personal identity. Of course, a psychological-continuity theory based on quasi-memory will be satisfactory only if it contains provisions that determine whether a case of quasi-remembering is a case of genuine remembering.

Fission and special concern

Most contemporary versions of the psychological view of personal identity assume that persons are physical in nature. As already mentioned, Locke’s soul-transfer example was replaced in the 20th century by brain-transplant examples. The idea is that the recipient of a brain transplant could be expected to have memories corresponding to the past life of the donor, as well as a psychological history generally continuous with that of the donor before the transplant. The recipient would think that he is the donor—and, according to the psychological view, others should think the same. In addition to appealing to the possibility of brain transplants, some psychological theorists have envisaged “teletransportation” devices that move persons around by transmitting information about their neural states from one location to another.

A variant of the brain-transplant example, due to the British philosopher David Wiggins, in which the two hemispheres of a brain are transplanted into two different bodies, has been extensively discussed since the 1970s. Here the supposition is that after the transplant there are two persons who are psychologically continuous with the person who existed before. Because these two persons are not identical to each other, it is impossible for both to be identical to the original person. Yet neither of them seems to have any characteristic that would make the original person identical to him and not to the other. Because such “fission” cases seem to constitute examples of psychological continuity without personal identity, they have been regarded as a challenge to the psychological view. They also seem to provide examples of quasi-memory that is not memory: the fission products would quasi-remember the past of the original person but arguably not remember it, if neither is identical to the original person.

Some proponents of the psychological view have responded by saying that what personal identity consists of is not psychological continuity itself but “nonbranching” psychological continuity, the fission cases being examples of “branching” psychological continuity. Theorists differ, however, in how convincing they find this proposal.

Fission cases also raise questions about the special concern that people have for their own future well-being. It seems plausible that a person anticipating fission would have a special concern for the welfare of both of the fission products, even though—strictly speaking—he would be identical to neither of them.

The idea of special concern has figured prominently in the work of the contemporary English philosopher Derek Parfit. In Reasons and Persons (1984) and other works, he argued that one’s special concern is not with personal identity per se but with the psychological continuity and connectedness that is normally sufficient for personal identity but is not sufficient in cases of fission. If by “survival” is meant having what is valued, or what matters, in the prospect of continuing to exist with a life worth living, then, according to Parfit, in fission cases there is survival without identity. Parfit’s treatment of fission cases has given rise to a new criterion of adequacy for any account of personal identity: it must explain why personal identity matters in the way it does.

Another objection to the psychological view has to do with the possibility of amnesia: the view seems to imply that a victim of complete amnesia is not the same person as he was before he was stricken. Alternatively, the psychological theorist would be committed to saying that, despite appearances, amnesia is not really possible. Defenders of the psychological view reply that the sort of amnesia that actually occurs is compatible with the psychological view, because people can recover from ordinary amnesia—which means that their memories continue to exist in a latent state—and in any case there is more to psychological continuity than continuity of memory. In order for a case of amnesia to be apparently incompatible with the psychological view, it would have to amount to a “brain zap” that destroys not only all the subject’s memories but also all past features of his psychology. There is no reason to think that a person could survive this.

The psychological view versus animalism

Coincident entities

A powerful set of criticisms, raised in the late 20th century, has to do with the intuitively plausible assumption that persons are human animals. Although (as mentioned earlier) most versions of the psychological view assume that persons are physical entities, they are committed to holding that a person is not identical to his body, because the relations that constitute personal identity are different from those that constitute bodily identity. For similar reasons, the psychological view is also committed to holding that a person is not identical to the particular human animal (the individual Homo sapiens) that exactly coincides with his body’s physical space. If this is correct, however, then the psychological theorist must accept the existence of “coincident entities”: numerically different things (the person and the animal) that happen to occupy the same space and to be composed of the same matter. For some philosophers, this is reason enough to reject the psychological view. Others have argued that, even if coincident entities are possible, the psychological view implies the counterintuitive claim that persons are not animals.

Too many minds

Furthermore, the view also seems vulnerable to what has been called the objection from “too many minds” (or “too many thinkers”). Given that a person and his coincident human animal are physically exactly alike, it would seem (on a physicalist view about mentality) that the human animal should have the same mental states as the person and so should itself be a mental subject and a person, contrary to what the psychological view maintains. It might seem that the only way to avoid this conclusion is to assume that animals cannot think, which is also strongly counterintuitive. (The claim that the psychological view implies that animals cannot think is often referred to as the “thinking animal” objection.

Considerations such as these have been raised by proponents of “animalism,” the theory that in the 1990s became the main competitor of the psychological view. According to the American philosopher Eric Olson and others, persons are biologically individuated animals whose persistence through time consists of biological continuity, which is constituted by the biological processes that make up an organism’s life. Animalism is additionally supported by the fact that in actual cases (not involving brain transplants and the like) sameness of person and sameness of human animal always go together.

Shoemaker, SidneySage School of Philosophy/Cornell UniversityDefenders of the psychological view, including Shoemaker, deny that they are committed to too many minds. Although persons and their coincident biological animals share the same physical properties, the result is not the instantiation of mentality in two different things, person and animal, but its instantiation in just one thing, the person. Only in the career of a creature having the persistence conditions of mental subjects—e.g., persons—are the physical-property instantiations embedded in such a way as to realize mental properties. Defenders also maintain that there is a good sense in which persons are animals, though not biologically individuated animals, and that animals in that sense can think. What they hold against animalism is the same as what Locke held against a similar view, the bodily theory: animalism is committed to rejecting the highly plausible intuition that in a brain transplant (or in a Lockean soul transfer) the person goes with the brain (or soul).

Other topics that have been addressed in contemporary discussions of personal identity include whether there can be survival of death, whether persons can exist in disembodied form, and whether there can be persons that are not constituted by organisms—possibly including computers and organized groups of organisms.

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